Thursday, June 30, 2016

So – unless UK politics is even stranger than it currently appears
(perfectly possible), and unless Boris Johnson is very, very clever indeed (Ian
Hislop would argue otherwise), it seems that “the beast of Brexit” won’t be the
next British Prime Minister. Maybe he’ll
be the one after that.

There’s been a quotation from Johnson floating around that I’ve only
paid half attention to, which runs.
"Left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the
instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain."

I assumed he was denouncing the English
working class, and he’d just got carried away and used the word plantain when
really he meant potatoes.

But no, I discover that
the line comes from an article of his in the Spectator, 2 February 2002, and
he’s actually talking about Uganda and the dubious advantages of international
aid.

“And don't swallow any of that
nonsense about how we planted the 'wrong crops'. Uganda teems, sprouts, bursts
with vegetation. You will find fruits rare and strange, like the jackfruit,
hanging bigger than your head and covered with green tetrahedral nodules.
Though delicately perfumed, it is, alas, more or less disgusting, and not even
Waitrose is pretentious enough to stock it.

“So the British planted coffee
and cotton and tobacco, and they were broadly right. It is true that coffee
prices are currently low; but that is the fault of the Vietnamese, who are
shamelessly undercutting the market, and not of the planters of 100 years ago.
If left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant
carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. You never saw a place so abounding
in bananas: great green barrel-sized bunches, off to be turned into matooke.
Though this dish (basically fried banana) was greatly relished by Idi Amin, the
colonists correctly saw that the export market was limited.”This is what matooke looks like:

It’s not clear to me whether Johnson has actually eaten matooke, or for
that matter jackfruit, quite possibly he has, but as you see the internet is awash with
pictures of him eating one thing and another. Here he is about to eat camel (who doesn't love a good piece of camel?):

Here he is eating octopus balls in Japan (ditto):

And here he is, for whatever reason, brandishing a bunch of asparagus, with handwritten commentary in the background:

Also, when
mayor of London he launched the “one pot pledge” urging
coffee drinkers to use at least one disposal coffee cup as a “mini allotment”
and grow food at home or in the office.This came after the environmental charity Garden Organic, estimated
that 88,218 disposable cups were used every 15 minutes in the UK, which seems an odd
way of putting it.

It is apparently possible to grow both bananas and jackfruit in a container, but I think you’d need something bigger than a
disposable coffee cup.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Here in the Psychogourmet test kitchen, we
like cheese and we like Stonehenge, so obviously we especially like them when
they come together, like this:

Yes, my local Los Angeles supermarket is
selling smoked cheddar cheese with an image of Stonehenge on the pack.

Now, we all know that Cheddar is a fairly
moveable feast when it comes to cheese.This very same supermarket can also supply American, Canadian, Australian
and Irish Cheddar.They are all,
needless to say, rather a long way from Stonehenge which is in Wiltshire, and
this particular cheese was manufactured in Somerset by a company naming itself
after Westminster - thereby offering a rambling cheese tour of England.The smoked Cheddar was OK, but no better than
OK.

Incidentally Keith Richards doesn’t eat
cheese, according to an old interview in GQ, he said “Cheese is very wrong.”Let him and Mark E. Smith argue it out, I
say.

As I’ve said before, I don’t really sit
here in California craving English food. But I happened to be in Santa Monica last
week, walking past one of those shops that sells “English fare” and so I bought
a couple of pork pies.

American made, I’m
sure, and they were kind of OK too, though not as good as they looked, a bit rubbery and
a bit tasteless, but at least they were there.I found myself wishing I’d had some strong, vinegary pickled onions.Jaded?Moi?

Friday, June 3, 2016

Remember when people used to worry that we might be entering a new Ice
Age and that the earth would become some giant ice-clad marble hurtling through
space?Well, I guess that’s one thing we
don’t have to fret any more.

Yes, I’ve been thinking about ice – not planets but spheres – ever since
I saw a bartender in Tokyo place a ball of completely transparent ice into a glass
before pouring whisky over it: maximum surface area, minimum dilution.At the time I thought the guy had carved it
by hand from a giant block, using an ice pick, but I can’t actually guarantee
that’s the case.He may have been using
a machine like this:

Since I don’t imagine myself to be much of an ice carver, and since I
can’t afford one those machines – they cost about a thousand dollars - I bought a
couple of moulds made by the Tovolo company.

They’re pretty much foolproof and it’s easy to get obsessed and fill
the freezer up with spheres.There are
also tricks you can play: making the spheres hollow, then filling them with
booze or smoke or aspic.

As you see in the pics, my spheres are by no means transparent and
there are a few online sources debating how you achieve transparency, but I
decided to go for minimum transparency and added food dye – black of course –
for all your gothic cocktail needs.

And here’s the beauty part - put a black ice sphere into a clear liquid,
say vodka, and it starts to “bleed.” Delicate black tendrils swim out into the
booze.

But that doesn’t last, and before long the vodka is as black as
your soul.